We settled around a low table scattered with half-drunk cups of tea. Yorke’s wife, Dajana, was curled up next to him, engrossed in a Murakami novel. Nearby, the hotel bartender pulverized ice in the world’s loudest blender.
Since 2021, Yorke and Donwood have been represented by Tin Man Art, a gallery based in London and Hampshire, and have put on six joint exhibitions of archival and new works. This is a marked departure from their origins.
Yorke, who is most famous as Radiohead’s lead vocalist and songwriter, met the multidisciplinary artist Donwood at art college, in Exeter, in the nineteen-eighties. Displeased with the image that the record label had chosen for Radiohead’s début album, “Pablo Honey,” Yorke asked Donwood to collaborate on the art for their next project.
Since then, the duo has maintained control over all of the band’s visual content, producing art works for every album, as well as for Yorke’s solo projects.
“This Is What You Get” draws on a vast archive of objects and images from the mid-nineties to the present day. The show is not a history of Radiohead but an exploration of the art that helped define the band’s music, and which was often integral to the experience of being a fan. (Example: a booklet of art work concealed inside the walls of every “Kid A” CD case, accessible only by cracking it open.) The drawings that filled Yorke and Donwood’s sketchbooks became some of the band’s most iconic insignia, tattooed on arms and scribbled on three-ring binders.
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